Wickedness in Design for People Diagnosed with Schizophrenia

With the digitisation of society, e-health technology increasingly supports new design situations that extend those traditional to Information Systems, and therefore need to be better understood. In design for complex, new and sensitive design situations, it is not possible to apply known methods and solutions without a deeper situational understanding. These design situations are fraught with wicked problems that are contradictory and complex. This paper intends to answer how the wickedness of the design situation when designing e-health technology for people diagnosed with schizophrenia can be understood and what consequences the design situation has for the design process. The paper presents a grounded theory analysis of stakeholder interviews and focus group interviews with people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Four wicked problems are identified: struggle of dependence, contradiction of social interaction, contradiction of trust and counteracting improvement behaviour. The problems are interrelated and have consequences for the design, acceptance, use and user involvement in design of e-health technology for people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The paper also shows the viability of using grounded theory for studying and describing situational wickedness

Becoming a Designer: The value of sensitive design situations for teaching and learning ethical design and design theory

Teaching and learning design theory are challenging tasks. To solely teach design theory through rules or codes of conduct, could be seen as a static way of approaching a complex phenomenon. In this paper, we argue for the importance of engagement in sensitive design situations, an approach that entails a process of de-emphasizing objectivity and promoting subjectivity through real-life sensitive cases to learn from, to foster reflectiveness for the future designers. This study aims to explore how sensitive design situations can be used when teaching and learning design theory. The research approach consists of a case study in a Nordic university, and a course in interaction design in a software engineering program. The sensitive design situation involves designing a digital artifact that can help children that have been diagnosed with cancer, cope with their cancer treatment. The main contribution is a teaching method for cultivating ethical design, which includes the application of sensitive design situations when teaching ethics to students. We illustrate that by forwarding three characteristics that can be used when teaching and learning ethical design through sensitive design situations